In the past, pages in the World Wide Web (Web) essentially contain only static content written in procedural codes using hyper text markup language (HTML). These web pages are stored on servers connected through the Internet. Each web page is associated with a uniform resource locator (URL) and a user/client can browse to a particular web page by requesting the web page from a server using the URL corresponding to the page. Some traditional web pages allow users to post data to another page using standard HTML input methods, such as forms. To post the data, a user must activate a trigger (e.g. a button) on the page to send the data to a process on the server, such as a common gateway interface (CGI) program. Particularly, the data is appended to the end of the URL associated with the process. The process may use the submitted data to generate another page.
The methods of posting data on traditional web pages have many deficiencies. For example, although a user can post data to a server, the data can only include actual values as part of the request or appended to the end of a URL as a text string. This method of posting data lacks the ability to send complex objects that cannot be properly represented by plain text. Also, the “posted to” web page must be regenerated for each post request. So, if a programmer would like to use input from the user on a particular web page to generate content on another related web page, the programmer must create a process to parse the web request or URL for the actual values submitted by the user on the original web page and to generate the other web page using the submitted values, without having the abilities to reuse features and complex data objects on the original web page.
Thus, there is a need for an efficient technique to persist data between web pages that does not require the storage of a large amount of data on the server for each web page and the complete regeneration of a web page in response to a posting request.